Drug Simulator

About the project

We implemented some of the features psychedelic drugs induce onto human beings using Oculus Rift through visual stimulation.

Some of the effects we covered were Visual Drift, Chromatic Aberration and Vortex Effect

Visual Drift

This effect is implemented by dynamically offsetting texture and distorting it with the shader. This allows for control of speed, direction, of a detailed vector field of the flow. The result works on terrain and objects to create the sense of Visual Drift. Low to moderate drift is pleasant and intriguing in the short term, however highly distorted flows and long exposure cause discomfort. The distortions in the scene have been calibrated accordingly to be comfortable for several minute exposures.

Chromatic Aberration

People under the influence of psychedelic drugs also experience a variety of colors in their visual experience. This is simulated by chromatic aberration around the edges of objects when the user changes their field of vision.

Vortex Effect

Another psychedelic effect is the Flowing effect. Under this effect, the user experiences curved edges around objects and distorted view. We implemented this by distorting the visual field in VR using the Vortex Effect. This creates the sense of disorientation and may lead to vection in some individuals.

Visual Tunneling

This psychedelic effect is a visual distortion which manifests spontaneously for temporary periods of time. When manifested, it alters the appearance of one's external environment into an all-encompassing tunnel. This experience results in the apparition of a large 3-dimensional tunnel in front of one's current field of vision. The effect may vary in intensity from being partially to completely encompassing.

Challenges faced and future plans

The main technical challenges we faced was in implementing the visual drift effect. The asset we used,limits us to use only one texture on the entire terrain. This would make the VR experience boring (since the whole terrain would have only one texture). Our solution was to superimpose two terrains into the same scene in order to have visual drift work only on some part of the terrain An additional challenge was that our implementation of the tunnel effect required modeling and UV texture mapping in Blender.

We want to make the visual tunnelling effect more dynamic so you can experience it wherever you look. Similarly we would incorporate more terrains that have the visual drift effect applied to them. We would also like to get feedback from phycologists and those who would be interested in using our project for research and augment and modify our 3 main visual effects based on their response.

Our visual drift and vortex effects are tuned well to offer a comfortable and immersive VR experience. We used alpha shaders to achieve that. Morevover, the visual tunneling effect was implemented using UV mapping. Some of the concepts which were helpful were different types of shading such as Lambertian Shading, optical flow, adjusting frame rates, texture mapping, bump mapping, normal mapping, distortion shading and post-rendering image warp.